Illegal Immigration: a heart problem

It’s heartening to see all the letters shaming the protestors of immigrant children being received at Camp Edwards. Clearly, for many of us, humanity trumps nationality or legality, at least for children.

Our nation’s illegal immigration problem is often posed as a leaky border problem. It may be more of a heart problem.

It’s not hard to understand the frustration over this issue. Especially with continuing high unemployment, how can we let legit workers be crowded out by illegit ones? It seems just common sense: if you are going to have laws, shouldn’t you enforce them effectively?

But illegal immigration seems likely to remain a mess because it involves that messy terrain, human emotions. For one thing, most proposed solutions go against the grain of our national mythology, the considerable sympathy for the underdog built into our national story, starting with the uninvited if not illegal immigrants who landed on these shores 400 years ago and all those since who, persecuted or otherwise miserable at home, have had the courage and initiative to seek a better life elsewhere. That we are physically and spiritually big enough to provide refuge seems almost a founding principle.

Moreover, making and enforcing laws against “aliens” runs counter to actual experience. Here on Cape Cod for instance immigrants, illegal or not, from what have come to feel like sister countries, such as Brazil, Bulgaria, and Jamaica, just don’t feel like aliens but interesting fellow humans who enhance life here.

For many of us, in actual interaction, “Fellow human” makes a stronger claim than “illegal alien.” We are well taught by our culture not to discriminate on basis of race, gender or creed..And we are, many of us, reluctant to discriminate on basis of nationality.

There’s another key point. In a world economy dominated by American business interests, we bear considerable responsibility for the economic miseries of places such as Mexico drives citizens of those places to seek relief in the U.S. In a very real sense, desperate illegals seeking economic asylum are a systematic product of our own country; a cost of doing business.

Whatever solution emerges to the immigration mess, it will have to start with certain facts: That many Americans feel that people are human before we are national. That humanity trumps legality.

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Blog Author

Brent Harold

This blog is an extension of the op-ed column I've written for the Cape Cod Times for 20 years (and counting). Like the column, although perhaps in a somewhat more spontaneous and exploratory way, it's about anything and everything. Issues of the ... Read Full